in the air. When a hare darted across the trail into the miniature forest of sage bushes, she, in spirit, darted with him, in a glee. As she cut herself a switch from a bush of willows she welcomed the drops of water that showered over her face and ran up her sleeve, as though, like some intelligent plant, she knew that the drops would make her grow. Even the mud that spattered her boots and stirrup straps she cheerfully accepted as seasonable. And she rode on at haphazard, as carelessly, yet with as much vigorous assurance as had been manifested by the hare. Like the hare she had no idea whither she was bound. Like the hare she was swiftly, gracefully making for the unknown destination. Temperamentally she was hare-like; that would make Keble a tortoise; and according to the fable he would win the race; that thought would bear investigation,—but not for the moment. For the moment she chose to intoxicate herself with the conviction that nothing in the world mattered. The ills that most people complained of,—ills like little Annie's earaches and her own increasing estrangement from her husband,—merely lent life an additional savor, and she could conceive of acquiring a taste for chagrin, as one acquired a taste for bitters; if not a taste, then at least an insensibility. Her whole philosophy amounted to a conviction of the necessity of behaving as though the odds weren't there.
There was only one thing that could have brought her atonement with the spring world nearer to per-
